1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of multi-media calls. More specifically, the present invention relates to the quality of service of multi-media calls.
2. Background Information
As advances in microprocessor and other related technologies continue to improve the price/performance of various electronic components, multi-media calls, such as video conferencing calls, including those calls conducted using personal computers (PC), have become increasingly popular in recent years. Numerous PC based multi-media call products designed to take advantage of the increased processing power of today's PCs are now available in the market place. An example of such multi-media call products is the ProShare™ Video Conferencing product, available from Intel Corp., of Santa Clara, Calif., the assignee of the present invention.
At the same time, with the advances in networking technology, increasing number of computers are connected to one another via private and public networks, such as the Internet, resulting in increasing number of multi-media calls being conducted over the various networks. Many of these networks, such as the Internet, are packet based and “best effort” type of networks. That is, end to end delivery for a packet can take any arbitrary amount of time, and there is no guarantee that the delivery time will be smaller than the latency requirement. Since the media packets of multi-media are isochronous in nature, as a result, the quality of service (QOS) for these multi-media calls cannot be guaranteed.
Recommendation H.323 of the International Telecommunication Union—Technical Section (ITU-T), entitled “Packet Based Multi-Media Communication System”, published November 1996, provides for call level admission control into a local area network (LAN) that allows a call to be denied access into the LAN due to its bandwidth limitation. The provision prevents the LAN from being overloaded, and partially addresses the QOS issue. However, potential bandwidth limitations of the intermediate hops remain a problem. Furthermore, merely managing a LAN's bandwidth at the call level often results in waste, as there is no correlation to the actual bandwidth consumption by the media streams of the calls. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, for interoperability reason, increasing number of multi-media call products have implemented support for H.323. Thus, a more efficient and/or effective approach to guaranteeing the QOS of a multi-media call that is compatible with the H.323 recommendation is desired.